Teaching and Learning Winter Festival 2017

Beginning January, 2017 the theme of this year's Teaching and Learning Winter Festival explores some of the most significant teaching and learning opportunities that exist when we "Go Beyond" to "Embrace the City, Embrace the World" and "Mix It Up". These of course are just a few of Concordia's prevailing strategic directions and when we dive into experiential and community engaged learning you know you’re in for a pedagogical adventure that makes learning momentous.

Showcase Day - Friday, January 27

5 Lessons and 6 Benefits to Course-Based Experiential Learning

Empowering learners to transition from the role of student to confident worker requires the opportunity to operationalize newly acquired skills in a real-world setting. To facilitate the process of organizing, running and evaluating a leisure-based program, under the guise of experiential learning, student groups work with community partners to provide a one-time leisure-based experience for a client group. The relationship between student and community partner, when managed correctly, creates community-based experiential learning (CBEL) opportunities.

CBEL means that students (and teacher) leave the comfort of the university classroom and work face-to-face with community partners. These learning opportunities mostly result in a win-win. For example, using the Revised Bloom Taxonomy as a pedagogical approach, CBEL moves student learning beyond the base level called the knowledge stage, up the scale to understandings, application, analysis and creativity. Many students report that their CBEL reinforced their passion to work in the profession. As the professor (facilitator of CBEL) I am bias, but believe that the learning opportunity simultaneously transmits to the students what it means to be a professional in their chosen career.

Doing Research Gets Students Involved with the Montreal Community

In this presentation, Ben Lander will share some of his experiences teaching CEGEP students about oral history methods, and discuss the value of having the students see their communities as sources of learning. He will also talk about the value of having a pedagogical focus on listening and self-reflection for students, and what he has learned about teaching and about life generally by doing this work.

Getting Out of the Way

How can we make our time in learning environments truly matter - for our students and for ourselves? Answers can be surprising. Experiential learning often involves ‘getting out of the way’ of the learning. It requires a change in the way we see ourselves as educators that some refer to as a shift from ‘sage-on-the stage to guide-on-the-side’. But how do we make that shift? And what happens in our classrooms and in ourselves when we do so? This session invites you to reflect on these questions to unearth the core principles underlying the teaching and learning experiences that matter most to us.

A First Step Beyond the Classroom: Team projects, real clients and tools to manage them

Done right, a semester-long team project with a real-world client is a learning experience unlike any other offered in a classroom. For the students, a satisfactory grade is now only one measure of success; delivering a project that is useful to the client is far more meaningful and relevant to their future career. For the professor, command of the class material is essential however acting as the project manager calls upon additional knowledge and skills. This session aims to first identify the roles and responsibilities of the professor and students while working on team projects with real clients. Secondly, various tools that have been developed and tested to manage the projects, teams, and relationships with the clients will be shared.
The contents of this talk are the result of the continual learning process during 30 years of teaching Information Systems Analysis. Former students frequently return to cite this class as a pivotal experience in their education and a significant influence on their careers, which has inspired the facilitator every time she teaches this course.

The Community as Classroom: Structuring data collection and learning beyond the walls

How can we help students understand the real-world and practical implications of research? How can build a deeper, more meaningful understanding of research methods for students? This session addresses the opportunities and challenges of engaging students actively in the research process through opportunities to design, collect, and analyze data based on an active research project in Montreal on food justice and sustainability. Lessons from sending students out to their neighborhoods and communities to learn the city and carry out research that directly impacts their lives and environments will be discussed.

Re-shaping Knowledge: Transfer and Acquisition

In this session, we look at fluid models of teaching and learning in social design education, that which includes participating within the immensely rich and diverse environment of the university, and then extending outward to engage with vibrant publics beyond the walls of the institution. This kind of ‘design inquiry’ acknowledges experiences of diverse and shifting environments, which implicates and re-shapes how we think through knowledge transfer and knowledge acquisition at both the program and course specific levels. Four course structures focusing on one or a combination of: experiential learning, outreach initiatives, cross disciplinary convergence and community engagement will be presented to highlight the ‘collaborative classroom’ as very challenging perhaps even of disruption but more so a space of reciprocity and transformation.

Building Community Connections

Since its inception more than 20 years ago, Concordia's ground-breaking interdisciplinary course on HIV/AIDS has offered students internships within local groups. Students can see the direct impact of policy on the lives of people living with HIV. They also better understand the pressures on groups that meet those needs while juggling the difficulties of evaluating programs, securing funding and meeting the changing needs of a variety of populations. This program requires ongoing outreach and planning with dozens of community organizations and projects. We will discuss how the process of placing students and supporting their involvement has been refined over the years.

Workshop Day - Friday, February 3

Community Based Experiential Learning: A hands-on workshop

If you enjoyed hearing about experiential learning in classrooms and communities as part of this year's showcase day and are teaching a course or planning a new one then you won’t want to miss getting your own hands dirty with some practical hands-on activities. Join Professors Ted Little, Theatre, Eva Pomeroy, Applied Human Sciences and Kathleen Vaughan, Art Education for this special workshop event on Friday, February 3 from 10:00 am - 12:15pm. Discover strategies, best practices and related activities highlighting the many ways in which you too can learn to “Go Beyond” by creating rich experiences through real world education.